Storage

The late-eighteenth century had seen construction at Chatham of a number of either new or replacement storehouses, allowing the yard to enter the period under review with sufficient storage of a better quality than that available in the other yards. Thus, on only a few occasions after 1815 was administrative attention directed to the construction or repair of storage facilities, it being necessary to carry out repairs to the rigging house [216], the lower mast house [221] and the roof of the hemp house [214], and to increase the number of linseed oil storage cisterns in the painter's shop [217].

Of equal importance to the possession of adequate storage was its efficient use, so that materials were stored under ideal conditions. The over-ordering of stores had to be avoided, as material would perish if kept for too long. This was the first economy attended to at the end of the french Wars [203], but no consequent reduction in storehouse labourers was achieved immediately [204]. As for the means of storage, because of the great quantities held, that for timber and hemp was subject to much scrutiny. In november 1823, the entire rope-making process was reviewed, with the first half of the subsequent report directed to the best method of storing hemp [212]. Criticisms made in this report resulted in a strong written defence by Commissioner Cunningham [213]. A particular problem with the storage of hemp was its liability to overheat [206, 208], made worse if excessive amounts of train oil were applied during hatchelling [209]. The challenge was not simply in the preservation of the original raw material but in keeping that which was partly manufactured. Having been spun into yarn, it was first stored in the white yarn house before being immersed in a kettle of heated tar and transferred to the black yarn house [208]. To aid the preservation of the finished product, thought was given to the possibility of replacing tar with a mineral composition applied by a painting process [205].

The most advantageous means of storing and preserving timber were also frequently reviewed, for large amounts could be lost as a result of decay [255]. In 1815, the Navy Board issued instructions to each of the dockyard Commissioners that outlined the best methods of preserving timber, with a summary of these instructions being sent to the Admiralty [255].

Kgositsile's work demonstrates how monopolized colonial geographies and politics of knowledge can be reconfigured through poetics of the body. In his poetry, his body is mobilized as a body of knowledge that enshrines principles of interconnectivity, interrelationality, and interdependence with other living bodies, human and non-human. His political commitment to Black liberation and solidarity in the Black world is fortified by gestures of intimacy, interiority, depthoffeeling, ‘breathing together’, and belonging. At the foundation of this sensibility is the bedrock of the matriarchive that attuned him to his feelings as a legitimate place from which to fashion a political identity as poet of the revolution. The matriarchive underlines his erotic registers and poetics that are productive in asserting and affirming his purposeful action: to his mother, he writes of the ‘slow sadness of your smile’ and ‘the slow sadness in your eye / remains fixed and talks’ (1975a: 9). Her unwavering eye, fixed and articulate, is ‘stronger than faith in some god who never spoke our language’ (1971: 28). Galekgobe's enunciating eye transmits knowledge in his mother tongue that he receives as gospel: her sadness commands a course of action to overturn the conditions that would have her live in so-called maids’ quarters in white suburbs of the white man's city, in the country of her birth. Her eye becomes his faith, the clear conscience and compass that orients his purpose in exile – ‘the determined desire / past the impotence of militant rhetoric’ (1971: 28). While the matriarchive entangles his political sensibilities with poetics of the body, it also demands – beyond the poetry – political action.

The matriarchive is his navigation system in exile, an internal guide with coordinates in a rich and substantive repository of mother tongue, Tswana oral/aural cultures, Southern African cosmologies, and philosophies of being. Kgositsile grounds his felt sense of self and orientation to the world in a creative grammar of geopoetics. In his poem to Madikeledi, ‘sadness’ appears thrice, which he writes of as ‘more solid’ than any system that ‘tried to break our back’, and which ‘strength[ens] the fabric of his heart, for us’ (1971: 80–1).

The courts martial presented in this, the fourth and final, chapter involve cases in which defendants were charged with more than one offence. These trials were fairly common. indeed, almost 37 per cent of the men in the sample, 490 of a total of 1,149, stood accused of committing more than one crime. A few such trials arose from extremely serious episodes [119]. Some were the result of feuds, real or supposed slights and the like [122, 134]. Others were the consequence of attempts to throw the book at the defendant, such as charging a man with drunkenness and neglect of duty, since to be found guilty of drunkenness meant that the accused was deemed guilty of being so intoxicated as to be incapable of performing his duty [136, 141]. Still others were the outcome of a single act of indiscretion [120, 121, 123, 125, 128, 129, 136, 138, 139, 141, 144]. however, most adjudication of multiple offences simply occurred because the miscreant had been presumed by his accuser to have committed more than one crime, such as using a ship's boat to desert [117, 118, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148].

117. Court Martial of John Kent

[ADM 1/5330]

Minutes of proceedings at a court martial held on board His Majesty's ship the Defence at Blackstakes on the 9th day of september 1793.

Present

James Cumming, Esqr., Captain of His Majesty's Ship Resolution and second officer in the command of His Majesty's ships and vessels in the river Medway and the buoy of the Nore, President.

Being all the captains of the post ships in the river Medway and at the buoy of the Nore, except Captain, the Honble Alexander Fr. Cochrane of His Majesty's Ship Hind, Captain John Maude of His Majesty's ship the Leopard, and Captain V. C. Berkley of His Majesty's Ship Assurance, who are absent with leave from the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.

The prisoner was brought into court and the evidence and audience admitted.

The present volume is a collection of British naval courts martial transcripts and related documents from the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In assembling and editing this collection, all of which are drawn from The National Archives, save for the first four, I have accumulated a number of personal debts. My friends and colleagues at the St Lucie County Library System in Fort Pierce, Florida, have been particularly helpful, most notably Mrs carol shroyer, Mrs Mary Wolf, Dr Edward Werner, Mrs Tammy Powley, Mrs Debie Hudson, Mrs Carla Niegelsen and Mr Robert Krause. With great kindness and skill, Dr Roger Morriss has guided the work to completion. Dr nicholas Rodger graciously has given me counsel on several points of detail. As they have done for the last twenty years, the staff at The National Archives have treated me with the utmost courtesy and helpfulness. The Navy Records society has extended me an extraordinary opportunity for which i am extremely grateful. and, as much as i am indebted to these people, i owe even more to my mother, Margaret D Byrn, who, despite a crippling stroke, has continued to offer encouragement and support. Needless to say, whatever errors there are to be found in what follows are mine and mine alone.

The documents in the present chapter have been selected to illustrate the precepts and practices of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century naval courts martial. The first four provide the legal and administrative framework within which his Majesty's tribunals at sea operated. Although several of the records that follow demonstrate that specific courts violated this or that axiom of law, these trials were the exception, not the rule. On the whole justice afloat abided by the rules established in An Act for Amending, Explaining and Reducing into One Act of Parliament the Laws relating to the Government of His Majesty's Ships, Vessels and Forces by Sea and the several editions of Regulations and Instructions relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea [1–4].

The various statutes and regulations governing justice afloat were very specific about how charges were to be drawn up and about the limited jurisdiction of naval courts martial. Once again, while a few courts violated these proscriptions [5, 43], most followed them closely. thus, examples of compliance are much more common than violations. indeed, inaccuracies in the charges or charges deemed beyond the purview of naval tribunals routinely led to the dismissal of cases [6, 15, 17, 19, 21, 28, 34, 38, 45].

Courts martial were not intended to deal with trivial offences. One device used to uphold this intention was the court of inquiry. Such courts commonly were ordered to determine if there were sufficient grounds to warrant the convention of a naval tribunal [30, 35, 41]. Moreover, courts martial were meant to instil a sense of their majesty in those who witnessed them by making examples of the individuals who were brought before them [16, 22]. Towards this end, justice afloat followed the same methods used by eighteenth-century common law courts. In Crime and Punishment in the Royal Navy, i argued that douglas hay's thesis that Georgian criminal trials ashore were based on an ideology of justice, terror and mercy was equally applicable to naval courts martial during the period under discussion [11, 23, 24].

Although such devices as courts of inquiry were safeguards against the terror and majesty of naval tribunals becoming too common (thus lessening their example), occasionally weak, frivolous or mute cases did reach trial. These cases usually resulted from the failure of either the prosecutor or defendant to appear [14, 36].

There is a throughline of continuity that Kgositsile aims to draw from the cultures, customs, and sense of community instilled in his homeplace by his mothers and bring to the cultures and politics of Johannesburg and those of the larger Black world. This is a non-linear line that he conceptualizes as a coil. The coil enables his poetics and politics to operate within cosmologies of Southern Africa and their conceptions of the human, temporality, spatiality, knowledge, and intersubjective relationality. The coil, harnessed for its etymology – to ‘gather together’ –, locates the aspirations and objectives of Kgositsile's life and work in an ongoing intergenerational interlocution contiguous with the structuring of the human as an onto-triad comprising of the living dead, the living, and the not-yet-born. This coil has been fashioned to suture Black America to Black South Africa, their oral/aural and literary traditions, histories, and politics. In his work, he devised several working terms and phrases that I have tasked myself with developing as critical theories from elsewhere with which we can disrupt and rupture the dominant, dehumanizing, hierarchical, gendering, differentiating, and mechanizing Europatriarchal terms of order. I have termed these poetics of possibilities. Much ink has been spilled pontificating on the crucial need for decolonial theory and concepts, but very few worlds, archives, vocabularies, practices, tools, material steps, processes, procedures, and approaches have been offered as interventions in these discourses.

My book has brought these poetics to the surface as an offering at this critical juncture in which the field of Black studies is preoccupied with imagining the human and the world anew to upend anti-Blackness and challenge the dominant paradigm of western civilization and its cosmologies of being, knowing, and doing. Kgositsile's work and the poetics of possibility it offers are crucial on many levels. This book draws from his work written in the 1960s and 1970s, critical decades that occasioned mass decolonization in Africa and the rest of the third world. Even though South Africa was not one of those countries that witnessed independence, I contend that Kgositsile, due to the internationalist nature of his work, should be read in the canon of decolonial theorists and poets of this era who sought to provide critical analysis of imperialism, culture, and liberation.

In a report presented to the Board of Admiralty in August 1814, John Rennie highlighted three specific limitations upon the value of Chatham as a dockyard, all of them requiring immediate attention [84]. The three problems to which he referred were the difficulties and hazards of navigating the Medway, the shallowness of the dry docks and the poor arrangement of the yard. To correct these shortcomings, over the next fifty years, the Admiralty expended a great deal of time and effort. Rennie's all-encompassing and immediate solution, the transformation of Limehouse and Chatham Reaches into a massive enclosed basin for the mooring of ships in a controlled level of water, was never adopted. However, it was an idea to which he returned in 1821 [105].

The hazards of navigating the river primarily resulted from an inadequate depth of water and the existence of numerous treacherous shoals. Furthermore, there was considerable evidence to show that the problem was getting worse [95]. Identified as a major factor in the process of shallowing was the existence of Rochester Bridge and its immense stone supports (or starlings). This reduced the flow of the current and inhibited the natural scouring of accumulated silt [96]. Much attention was, therefore, given to a complete replacement of the Bridge [93, 99]. Other factors, either actual or potential, were also examined and commented upon throughout the period [93, 117, 118]. Despite the partial rebuilding of Rochester Bridge, the reshaping of the dockyard wall [87, 117, 120] and the removal of a number of further obstacles that contributed to a reduction in the flow of the Medway, it was ultimately the utilisation of more efficient dredgers [89, 112, 119] and use of paddle steamers for the towing of ships [116] that made the greatest contribution to improved navigation of the Medway. However, the problem still existed in 1857 [120].

The second problem to which Rennie alluded in his submission of 1814 was the shallowness of the dry docks and their poor state of upkeep. At the time the Admiralty agreed that all dry docks should undergo a thorough repair and improvement. At the same time, Rennie suggested the construction of a series of new docks. The Admiralty accepted the need for one new dock. This was built between Nos 2 and 3 docks [88]. Although preparatory work began in 1816, the first stone was not laid until March 1818 [98].

This volume of The Rodney Papers, the second of a projected three-vol- ume edition of the admiral's papers, covers the admiral's life from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 until August 1780. During these years, Rodney, through a lavish lifestyle and a habit of gambling, squandered his fortune and fell into the clutches of moneylenders. This led him to at- tempt, without success, to recoup his finances by becoming in 1770 the commander-in-chief of the squadron at Jamaica. Upon his return from the West Indies, having by then no Parliamentary immunity, Rodney was Forced to flee to Paris to escape his creditors. Only the goodwill and money of a French nobleman, Duc de Biron, enabled a pennyless Rodney to leave Paris in 1778, just days before the beginning of the war between britain and france. In 1779 the British government, desperate for the services of an admiral who could fight and win battles, appointed Rodney commander-in-chief of the squadron in the leeward islands. On his pas- sage to the West indies Rodney fought and won the moonlight battle against the spanish and successfully relieved Gibraltar. Once in the West indies, during 1780 Rodney fought several indecisive battles, in the course of a skilful defensive campaign against superior French forces, before sailing for North America at the onset of the hurricane season. During the years 1763–1780 Rodney plunged from being a Member of Parliament, a successful admiral and the Governor of Greenwich Hospital to a debtor's exile in France only to rise again and become a victorious admiral and a national hero.

The selection of documents in this volume of The Rodney Papers deals with Rodney's career during the years following the end of the seven years War and the start of the American War. The documents cover the relief of Gibraltar and the 1780 campaign in the Leeward Islands. The present edition attempts to elucidate the role of Rodney in the military and political events of the 18th century as well as to present his views on naval affairs and on the workings of the navy as an institution. The materi- als for this volume come from the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the British Library, the New-York Historical Society and the William Clements Library of the University of Michigan.

Vice Admiral George Brydges Rodney, upon his return to England from the Leeward Islands at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, was a person of substance and position within English society, being a success- ful flag officer in the Royal Navy, the owner of a landed estate and a Member of Parliament. Nevertheless, when he hauled down his flag and came ashore, despite his many professional achievements as an officer in the Royal Navy during both the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, Rodney was in many respects singularly ill-equipped to cope with the pressures generated by the demands of peacetime. In the years between the Seven Years’ and American wars Rodney would, in a stag- gering display of ill judgement, come close to destroying his career as a navy officer, alienate his friends and patrons, and be forced to flee Eng- land in order to escape his creditors after dissipating his fortune through high living, electioneering and gambling. Over-bearing, avaricious and disfunctional, Rodney would pass the years 1763–1778 crashing through life while alternatively squandering money and attempting to grasp it.

In 1764 Rodney married Henrietta Clies. While there is no surviving record telling exactly when this event took place, there is no doubt as to the identity of the bride. Indeed, the marriage probably surprised some of Rodney's friends and acquaintances. He most probably first came into contact with the Clies family when he was a captain at Lisbon. Members of Henrietta Clies's family were retainers and employees of the Compton family when Rodney was courting his first wife Jane Compton. The rela- tionship with the Clies family was transferred to London when Rodney and his first wife established a household in England and the Clies became part of it. Then, when Jane Rodney died, Henrietta's mother assumed the role of looking after Rodney's children. Rodney's marriage to Henrietta Clies can easily be understood in human terms, especially those of loneli- ness, for in 1764, when the marriage took place, Jane Rodney had already been dead for seven years. Nevertheless, Henrietta Clies was twenty years younger than Rodney and there can be no doubt that the Clies family had been dependents.

When South African poet and statesman Keorapetse Kgositsile (1938–2018) was instructed by senior members of his party, the African National Congress (ANC), to flee the country into exile in 1961, he packed among his meagre belongings a corpus of Tswana literary classics. To him, they enshrined a set of valuables, of knowledge systems, aesthetic practices, cosmologies, and mythologies he could marshal to counter colonial modernity's anti-Black warfare. As a revolutionary writer, he used the worlds from these classics as a basis to assert the existence of other forms of being, knowing, and belonging that were otherwise to the Eurocentric, racist, capitalist, and Christian social orders imposed by colonialism and apartheid. The Tswana literatures that accompanied him into exile were material representations of the values instilled in his formative years, used as bridges to connect politics of the homeplace with those of his unfolding exile travels and writing life.

He arrived with this treasure trove in the nascent cultural and political ferment of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements (BAM) in the United States of America in 1962. He harnessed that Tswana archive – comprising dramas, novels, and an anthology of poetry – in his five collections of poetry published in the States with the intent to foster continuities between the African American struggle and the struggles of Black South Africa. Further, he understood the Black experience as connected, thereby embracing Black world politics as fundamentally opposed to the culture of Jim Crow, colonialism, and apartheid. Operating in this world of Blackness he sought to bridge geographical and linguistic chasms, to foster political solidarities through cultural relations with Black diasporans.

His literary corpus published in the States, as well as his political activities, illustrate an assertion of the existence of otherworlds within the dominant paradigm of anti-Blackness.

The previous chapter saw Kgositsile mobilize the names-songs-places dynamic to anchor his work in the bedrock of his beginnings, the homeplace of his formative years, in a poetics that centralizes the body as the most intimate of contact zones from which to foster revolutionary poetry and political solidarities. The matriarchive informed, shaped, and held together the zone of relationality and Black radical sociality through the internetworked bodies of the mothers, bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of knowledge, and celestial bodies. In setting up this chapter's concerns as being continuous with the previous one, here I offer a recap of my findings from chapter 2. Kgositsile settled on the umbilical cord as a connective tissue between his mother and himself, the son, while birth rituals generated a poetics of relation between the mother, the land in which it is buried, and the son. Further, in his shifting and sifting, he linked the bodies of his mothers and bodies of land with celestial bodies: ‘the son must move on to set like the sun and lie buried in the west, or rise again to burn in this place with newborn fire’ (1973a: 64). Here the son is exiled from the land and enlists imageries from cosmological phenomena to transubstantiate himself from the son to the sun, setting in the west, and returning with ‘newborn fire’. The choice of ‘newborn’ sets his meditation up in a dialogue with the matriarchive that makes it possible for the new-to-beborn, ‘rising again’, a (re)birth – ‘Mother, what is my name?’ – to undergird his liberatory purpose that must always be tied to the collective.

The bodies of water, central and fundamental to these relational poetics grounded in the matriarchive, are the principle of creation and creativity, recreation and regeneration that make it possible for Kgositsile to fashion poetics of death and rebirth, destruction and recreation, and flowering creativity and creation in the desolation of exile. The bodies of water in the previous chapter located the matriarchive of his formative years in continuity and locution with those encountered in exile. These were understood as held together, or, to harness the uses of the coil, gathered together by forces of the Limpopo and Mississippi Rivers, which confluence in the Atlantic and other oceans.

Throughout the period 1815 to 1865, the primary tasks undertaken by Chatham dockyard were those of constructing new ships and of undertaking large-scale repairs on older vessels. In common with most other yards, Chatham also undertook a multiplicity of further duties. Among these were the fitting and re-fitting of ships [29, 37], the care and maintenance of vessels moored in the ordinary [37] and minor repairs on operational warships. With regard to the latter, Chatham was not especially suited. In part, this was because of its great distance from the sea but also a result of the declining depth of the Medway. The river, during much of this period, was subject to considerable shoaling, there being an insufficient depth both for the larger ships of the ordinary and for rapid, trouble-free passages between the dockyard and the open sea. It was recognition of these problems that prompted John Deas Thomson, a member of the Navy Board, to submit to Lord Melville in 1829 a recommendation that Chatham should be strictly confined to those duties to which it was geographically suited [31]. However, the idea of Chatham specialising in building and large-scale repairs, was not adopted at this time and the yard continued to perform a mixture of duties throughout the nineteenth century.

The Admiralty, whenever a new vessel was to be constructed, took the initial decision with instructions forwarded to Chatham by either the Navy Board (prior to its abolition in 1832) or the Admiralty office (after 1832). Such orders were often accompanied by a set of drawings, although on occasions it might be a simple notification, with drawings sent nearer to the time of construction [56, 57, 73]. On being informed that a new ship was to be built, the Master Shipwright, whose department oversaw both construction and repair work, would consider the facilities and manpower that would be required. Of course, the administrators in London already had an awareness of docks and slips likely to be available, sometimes precisely stipulating which facility was to be used [12, 14, 28]. The choice of Chatham for construction of a new vessel was not always contingent upon the availability of a particular dock or slip; instead it might result from an accumulation of the necessary building materials at that yard [17].